Delivered. In 2018-2019, during their residency at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes, which invites thinkers from the North and the South to question the concepts usually used in social sciences, the French economist Gaël Giraud and his Senegalese colleague, Felwine Sarr , engaged in a fruitful dialogue, continued during the Covid-19 pandemic. Far from an arid and austere essay, despite a few difficult passages, The economy to come is an iconoclastic work combining scientific, philosophical, historical and spiritual reflections in order to rethink the foundations of the world economy.
The two thinkers started from an observation, that of the economic impasse of the Western model resulting from a modernity which could not hold “The promise of a shared utopia, open to a future” of the Enlightenment by developing an economic system – capitalism – which prospered through slavery and colonization and which fostered the explosion of inequalities and the climate crisis. They then set out to see how it is still possible to achieve the Enlightenment by giving meaning to the future despite the failure of the idea of progress. “Maybe it’s time, asks Gaël Giraud, that the peoples of the South teach Europeans how to inherit the Aufklärung themselves [les Lumières allemandes] of whom they believe themselves to be the legitimate sons and daughters, but whom they have betrayed. “
The two authors invite a cultural and epistemological decentering, based on their own legacies and experiences. Director of research at the CNRS, after having been chief economist at the French Development Agency, Gaël Giraud is also a Jesuit priest, author of several works suggesting a recasting of liberalism, like Twenty proposals to reform capitalism (Flammarion, 2009) and Financial illusion (Atelier editions, 2014). As for Felwine Sarr, from a Muslim culture, a great reader of Asian and Christian mystics, former dean of the faculty of economics and management at the University of Saint-Louis in Senegal, he now teaches African philosophy at the Duke University (North Carolina). He is the author, with Bénédicte Savoy, of the report requested by Emmanuel Macron on the restitution of African heritage, and of several writings which, like the essay noted Afrotopia (Philippe Rey, 2016) but also the most discreet Dahij (Gallimard, 2009) is suitable both for refocusing on oneself in order to be able to open up to the other and to decenter to better come back to oneself.
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